DeepSpaceDreamer wrote:The Silmarillion- J.R.R. Tolkien. But I can only read parts at a time, otherwise I begin to get misty eyed and am apt to become overwhelmed with the urge to write a long, flowery poem about whatever is around me at that moment, and float around my house and hum "Concerning Hobbits", or say strange things- oh, well I do that anyway.Many good- and bad- pieces of poetry have resulted from this.

There is grandeur in this view of lifeWhere one becomes many through struggle and strife,But the Mother of Mysteries is another man's call:Why is there something 'stead of nothing at all?The Darwin Song Project

Just finished Last Argument of Kings, final part of The First Law trilogy, Joe Abercrombie.I really enjoyed the series and Mr Abercrombie goes onto my list of must read Authors. After the relentless pace of the first two books it slowed a bit for the first half of this. The pace change was welcome as the threads tied together and the whole thing ended at breakneck speed. Many plot turns I’d seen way back, many I had not. Many characters back to the mud (dead) by the end and others awaiting a sequel I’d happily read should it appear. I think part of what I enjoyed about this is that his ‘heroes’ are not just ‘flawed’ but often totally bloody evil! But somehow, ‘heroes’ they are, and I loved and identified with them!

smudge wrote:Just finished Last Argument of Kings, final part of The First Law trilogy, Joe Abercrombie.I really enjoyed the series and Mr Abercrombie goes onto my list of must read Authors. After the relentless pace of the first two books it slowed a bit for the first half of this. The pace change was welcome as the threads tied together and the whole thing ended at breakneck speed. Many plot turns I’d seen way back, many I had not. Many characters back to the mud (dead) by the end and others awaiting a sequel I’d happily read should it appear. I think part of what I enjoyed about this is that his ‘heroes’ are not just ‘flawed’ but often totally bloody evil! But somehow, ‘heroes’ they are, and I loved and identified with them!

Absolutely agree.Just so you know, there are two sequels out already: Best Served Cold and The Heroes.

j.mills wrote:Errr, I think yer Lost Tales are things assembled and 'embellished' for JRRT's notes and wotnot. Whereas yer Silmarillion is a finished work?

Oui, c'est ca, c'est vrai. Just trying to picture what is up in my loft, there are at least 4 volumes of Lost Tales, perhaps 5, perhaps more. I haven't looked in them since my late teens/early twenties, however.

There is grandeur in this view of lifeWhere one becomes many through struggle and strife,But the Mother of Mysteries is another man's call:Why is there something 'stead of nothing at all?The Darwin Song Project

There is grandeur in this view of lifeWhere one becomes many through struggle and strife,But the Mother of Mysteries is another man's call:Why is there something 'stead of nothing at all?The Darwin Song Project

j.mills wrote:Errr, I think yer Lost Tales are things assembled and 'embellished' for JRRT's notes and wotnot. Whereas yer Silmarillion is a finished work?

Oui, c'est ca, c'est vrai. Just trying to picture what is up in my loft, there are at least 4 volumes of Lost Tales, perhaps 5, perhaps more. I haven't looked in them since my late teens/early twenties, however.

Apaprently a collection of old laundry lists and receipts from the grocery store frequented by the good professor is being edited by a distant relative of the Tolkien family. A rumour that Peter Jackson has bought the movie rights is seriously unfounded.

H.L. Menken: "Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

There is grandeur in this view of lifeWhere one becomes many through struggle and strife,But the Mother of Mysteries is another man's call:Why is there something 'stead of nothing at all?The Darwin Song Project

Somebody (smudge?) was interested to see how I found the Dee Brown book I was reading, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: four stars:

It's the 1860s and the West is just opening up: there are gold-digging settlements in California, the odd ranching town, but essentially the huge sweep of the mid-West remains home "only" to Native Americans and buffalo. Control and settlement of this vast country urgently requires infrastructure, to enable faster, safer and higher-volume transport than can be achieved by wagon train or long shipping routes. The land is ripe for the picking when the railroad men step in, hastily throwing down thousands of miles of track and picking up, in return, enormous government subsidies and eye-popping land grants that extend tens of miles to either side of their lines.

Brown spends the first half of the book describing how the first transcontinental line was laid: the engineering challenges, the savage competition between the companies building from opposite ends, the outright disregard for native rights, and most of all the shameless swindling of the public purse by the scoundrels at the top. For bribed politicians and ruthless railway tycoons alike, the railroad was only the means to an end - not of conquering the land, but of making themselves immensely rich by scandalous financial arrangements, to which building and running railways was merely an afterthought, a minor legal hoop to jump through. Consequently the lines were poorly and rapidly built, taking routes chosen not for speed or safety but to maximise the rewards from completing the miles:

As for Dr. Durant and his cronies, there is no record of what they sang as they collected the $16,000 per mile from the government for the track laid by the workmen, the $25,000 per mile of excess profits from Credit Mobilier, the 12,800 acres of land per mile, and whatever else they were able to divert from the sales of stocks and bonds.

[A government examiner's] report to Congress, however, like most honest reports that might interfere with the exploitation of the public, was filed away and quickly forgotten by the people's representatives in Washington.

Notwithstanding these distasteful machinations, there is a spirit of adventure in these escapades and a true sense of achievement, albeit tempered by the job being done badly for greed instead of well for progress. The two sides of this coin are perfectly symbolised when the tracks from the east and west are to be joined by a golden spike: executives from both companies, concerned only with finance and not at all with engineering, swing their sledgehammers and miss!

After this first conquest, the book explores other aspects of the railroads' impact: the experiences of travellers, the Hell On Wheels towns that followed the construction teams, the southern and northern lines, the conning of migrants into buying worthless land and their further exploitation through high freight-rates for their meagre produce. The picture is colourful but not pretty, and Brown shows how the outrageous huckstering and profiteering led to the miserable, vestigial railways that drearily cross the USA today, undermaintained, underdeveloped and underused - yet paid for by public taxes several times over.

Although his milieu is the 19th-century, Dee Brown's books teach political lessons that seem ageless. If reading them is sobering, it is nonetheless most certainly educational: we can't learn these things often enough. - Oh, and it's a rollicking good read too.

There is grandeur in this view of lifeWhere one becomes many through struggle and strife,But the Mother of Mysteries is another man's call:Why is there something 'stead of nothing at all?The Darwin Song Project

Why E Equals M C SquaredMade accessible to those whoare interested in physics like mebut who do not have a degree in thesubject : only couple of dozen diagramsThe writing is fluid and clear and captivatesthe reader : book I can thoroughly recommendLike it enough to want to read it twice and the onlyauthors I have ever done that for are : Alistair Reynoldswhose best work is Revelation Space and Sven Hassel whosebest is Wheels Of Terror though I prefer Legion Of The Damned

I've only ever seen the TV series, True Blood (AKA Dead People in Heat). How do the books compare?

"... I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."